British PoW who survived the nightmare of Nagasaki

'Blimey, I was there...' Sailor just three miles from atom bomb blast

- By Marco Giannangeli and Gary Bridson-Daley

BRITISH prisoner of war Geoff Stott witnessed the dawn of the nuclear age up close and survived the atomic bomb explosion that ripped apart Nagasaki.

Geoff, 21 at the time, was toiling in a shipyard having been captured three years before by Japanese forces.

On August 9, 1945, he left the Kawanami shipyard on Koyagi Shima island in Nagasaki Bay to see what had shaken the vast workplace to the core.

The sky was on fire as a great column of boiling smoke rose across the bay, looking like a furnace had erupted from the earth.

The top billowed into the famous mushroom cloud and even from three miles across the harbour, the scale was monstrous.

Geoff, who is now 101, saw rooftops collapse in waves and a thick haze swept towards the gathered PoWs with a hot, gritty wind full of ash and charred wreckage.